So even though The Creative Assembly had nothing to do with Colonial Marines and has been working in relative secret on Alien: Isolation for the last three years, the negative feelings among players that follow the former have cropped up surrounding the official announcement of the latter. But according to The Creative Assembly, there’s an upside to those negative feelings: They prove people still care about Alien.

“One of the most important things for us as a development team is, you know, is the IP still relevant; do people still want it?” said Lead Designer Clive Lindop in an interview with Game Front in December at an Alien: Isolation preview event at The Creative Assembly’s studios in England. “Ironically, the passion with which people wanted to say what they felt about A:CM and what they wanted to see from the franchise was actually very positive for us, because okay, here’s a group of people who still expect and want the best possible game, the highest standards from the game, and there are clearly still people who care a lot about Alien as an IP. That audience is still out there.”

And in fact, The Creative Assembly found that players weren’t just complaining about Colonial Marines, they were speculating on the game they’d like to see out of the franchise — a slow-burn survival-horror title more akin to Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien than its 1986 sequel Aliens, directed by James Cameron. Nearly all the games created in the 30 years of video games in the Alien franchise have focused on Cameron’s take instead of Scott’s, Colonial Marines included — but not Alien: Isolation.

Senior Producer Jonathan Court said it was difficult to remain silent about The Creative Assembly’s game even as players were asking for the very game the studio believed it was creating.

“Obviously, we spent a long time scouring the forums and feedback from Colonial Marines once it was released, and one thing we saw repeatedly was people talking about the game we were secretly making,” Court said. “It was really, really encouraging and really exciting, and we kind of wanted to shout out to them, ‘That’s our game you’re talking about there!’ One thing that came from the Colonial Marines thing is people want what we’re making, and what we’re making is very different from what came before. It’s interesting, that’s for sure.”

That’s another big point of emphasis for The Creative Assembly: that Alien: Isolation is different in a fundamental way from the games that came before it. During the preview event, in which journalists were first introduced to the game, CA gave very little up-front information about what would be experienced before presenting gameplay.

The idea, Lindop said, was to let the game speak for itself. Alien: Isolation’s focus is on interactions with a single alien, and Lindop said the developer wants to reframe the player relationship that has formed with that alien across previous games. Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival-horror title, and the demo given to journalists featured no guns or other enemies of any kind.

And it’s pretty clear that The Creative Assembly and Sega want to avoid any of Colonial Marines’ pre-release missteps. Rather than show video of different portions of the game — similar to how Colonial Marines was presented in its previews — the developer chose to give journalists a working hands-on demo, which centered on the alien, for their first experience with Alien: Isolation. The time The Creative Assembly spent in its reveal establishing the systematic behaviors and basic lethality of its single, nigh-unstoppable alien already puts Alien: Isolation into a different category than its shooter predecessors.

Court said he sees Alien: Isolation as being something players will judge on its own merits, rather than based on those games that came before it.

“I think we’re making something so different from what’s gone before that it stands up on its own, and we’re so confident about the quality of what we’re making,” Court said.

Whether its differences really will be enough to protect Alien: Isolation from the bad (acidic) blood associated with Aliens: Colonial Marines won’t be apparent until The Creative Assembly’s game drops in late 2014. But it does seem like the developers are right about at least one thing: There are still a lot of people who are very interested in the franchise, and they’re still watching intently for their dream Alien game.

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While we want a good Alien(s) game I think most of the backlash had to do with the fact that Gearbox pulled a bait and switch. There have been plenty of mediocre Alien games that have come and gone without a tenth of the attention A:CM got.

Historically most ‘Alien’ games have been action games, not horror games. Easier to make perhaps.

‘Colonial Marines’ is an action game, not at all surprising since it is based on ‘Aliens’ by Cameron, which is an action film and not a horror film. Maybe I’m a genius but I fully expected ACM to be an action game, which is exactly what I got. And as an action game ACM was quite good (after the big update mind you).

The coming game ‘Isolation’ is based on the first ‘Alien’ film, which actually IS a horror film. With this in mind I expect a horror game, not an action game, i.e. more Amnesia/Condemned and less Quake/Doom.

People need to learn to separate the ‘Alien’ films; they are not all the same, they are not all horror films.
It matters because it determines the expectations people have for future ‘Alien’ games.
ANY game based on ‘Aliens’ by Cameron will be more of an action game than a horror game.
That is a logical extrapolation.

I’m in agreement with Richard. A:CM was flawed (though the PC version seems to be free of the bugs that formed a significant chunk of complaints against the game) but delivered more or less what I wanted in an Aliens game. Yes, I’d have preferred it if they had retconned Alien 3 completely out of continuity, and it would have been nice to see some UPP troops or something running around (the W-Y mercs were cool, though), but ultimately, I don’t consider the money I spent on it any more a waste than that spent on any other game that I’ve enjoyed.

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